If polygamy became legal in this country, would the LDS Church, which abandoned it in 1890, embrace it again?

After all, some say, it remains part of Mormon doctrine, enshrined in LDS scripture, and many Latter-day Saints believe it will exist in the afterlife. Even the late Mormon apostle Bruce R. McConkie wrote that the “holy practice” would resume after Jesus Christ’s Second Coming.

But Brigham Young University political science professor Valerie Hudson challenges all those assertions about polygamy’s future — on Earth and in heaven.

Hudson sees an urgency in confronting these notions because she predicts the United States will, within a decade, allow same-sex marriage, polygamy, polyandry and all kinds of relationships among consenting adults.

So it’s time, she says, for Mormons “to come to grips with the whole doctrinal mess.”

The LDS Church has posted on its website, lds.org, several statements about its historical practice of polygamy, but declined to comment on polygamy’s future on Earth or in an afterlife.

Hudson explored the topic during a speech this month at the annual FAIR conference for Mormon apologists in Sandy and in a phone interview.

Any discussion must begin with Mormon doctrine, not just so-called cultural doctrine or folk beliefs. Thus, Hudson limits her analysis to LDS scripture, most notably Doctrine and Covenants Section 132.

These passages, considered a divine revelation to Mormon founder Joseph Smith recorded in 1843, spell out many of the faith’s beliefs about marriage. Such unions between a man and a woman, the LDS prophet declared, were not just for this life, but for eternity.

In the section’s second half, however, Smith describes plural marriage but introduces it with a discussion of the biblical patriarch Abraham and his two wives, Sarah and Hagar, who together were able to produce a vast posterity.

“Was Abraham, therefore, under condemnation [for having plural wives]?” verse 35 asks. “Verily I say unto you, Nay; for I, the Lord, commanded it.”

Then next passage mentions God’s mandate that Abraham kill his son Isaac.

“God wishes us to see how and why he views the two situations as analogous,” Hudson said in her speech. “The Lord is telling us that the term ‘Abrahamic sacrifice’ refers not only to the story of Isaac but applies to the story of Hagar, as well.”

In the story of Isaac, God asks Abraham to depart from the law against killing. In the end, an angel stays Abraham’s hand, Hudson says, relieving him from an “exceptional commandment.”

God does not then change the rule and say it’s now OK to kill.

Likewise, Mormon polygamy was an exception to the eternal principle of monogamy, she says, and it was removed when the sacrifice no longer was necessary.